Assimilate UK! The British Music Industry Now Controls Your Internet | One million 3-D printing projects later, Shapeways grabs a new investment | Researchers Set New Cryptanalysis World Record for Pairing-based Cryptography | Smoke Up: An Interview With The Creator Of The Ultracool Pax Vaporizer | Not a Kodak Moment: Apple being sued by Kodak over patents

One by one the UK’s ISPs are falling to a creeping censorship of the web led not by some secretive government organisation but by the UK’s music industry in the shape of the British Phonographic Industry, the British record industry’s trade association. There is no democratic check on what’s happening and little recourse left open to the average person.In a nice piece of investigation, Zack Whittacker at ZDNet has unpacked what’s happening before our eyes.Not unlike SOPA, the U.K.’s antipiracy legislation, the Digital Economy Act, has a “three-strikes” system leading to Internet disconnections, but it’s been put on hold for implementati[...]

After 3-D printing more than one million objects, Shapeways�announced the close of a $6.2 million second round of funding, reports the New York Times. Keeping up with the growing interest in�three-dimensional printing, the company helps you design and print nearly any object of your dreams.While 3-D printing has been available for many years, the Maker subculture and 3-D printers such as the MakerBot have made 3-D printing cheaper, more popular,�and accessible to the masses. Three dimensional printers are still a bit too expensive for the average person to buy, so companies like Shapeways have popped up as a middleman between your 3-D vision and the finished, printed piece.Shapeways lets y[...]

Researchers from Fujitsu Laboratories, Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) and Kyushu University have set a new cryptanalysis world record by cracking a 278-digit-long (923-bit) key used in a pairing-based cryptography system, Japanese IT services provider Fujitsu said Monday.The cryptanalysts who worked on this project cracked the 923-bit encryption key in 148.2 days by using 21 computers with a total of 252 cores. It had been previously estimated that pairing-based cryptography of this length would require several hundred thousand years to break, the researchers said.The previous record dated from 2009 when researchers from NICT and Japan's Hako[...]

If you enjoy smoking fine botanical products, including, but not limited to, tobacco, you owe it to yourself to check out the Pax by Ploom, a compact vaporizer with a spacious oven and a few features that make the experience of lighting up quite a treat.The guys at Ploom have been working on vaporizers for a while, introducing the Ploom ModelOne in 2010. This small e-cigarette used small pods to release fragrant smoke. The Pax, however, uses electricity versus butane and can burn almost anything.I talked to James Monsees, CEO and Creative Director, about the new product and his vision for taking vaporizers – and their owners – to the next level.TC: Tell me about yourself. Who[...]

Apple is being sued by Kodak, the camera company that recently filed for bankruptcy, for a number of patents, which Apple says Kodak doesn’t have the right to sell.According to Reuters, the Cupertino-based company is standing in the way of Kodak auctioning off its patents as part of its bankruptcy deal. Kodak filed for bankruptcy in January and must liquidate its assets, including its patent portfolio, in order to pay back a nearly billion-dollar loan the company borrowed to stay afloat. But Apple says Kodak cannot sell certain patents pertaining to technology that allows people to preview digital photos on a camera’s LCD screen. The two companies worked on the technology togeth[...]